Mo Hayder - Skin

‘A child ? What would a kid have been doing in a hellhouse like that?’

‘Do you remember this word?’ He glanced over his shoulder then turned back, leant into her and whispered, ‘Tokoloshe.’

‘Ye-es,’ she said cautiously. ‘Of course. And I remember they dressed someone up to scare the living crap out of people, but I thought you had him.’

‘No. The guy we arrested was too big. Too big to be the Tokoloshe.’

Flea started to laugh, but when she shaded her eyes to study him, she saw he wasn’t joking. She’d heard that some of the people in London who’d worked on a muti case there had developed a taste for Africa, that now they took family holidays in Botswana and Ghana, not Margate. They told their colleagues they were brushing up for a future in hostage negotiation with one of the securities agencies like Kroll, when actually they’d fallen in love with the dark continent. Maybe Caffery was like them and had started to believe in the mumbo-jumbo. She’d have liked to say something, but there was an unwritten law in the police: thou shalt never ever make thine superior officer look a tit. She narrowed her eyes and kept her mouth shut.

‘I wanted to ask you,’ he said, ‘because one thing all the witnesses said was that it came out of the water like it had been submerged. I wanted to know how you think it achieved that.’

At that she dropped her arms. Now she got it. Now she saw what was going on. The boys had leaked she’d been narked that day and set Caffery up for this wind-up. Someone else in the water in quarry number eight? An African monster swimming around in the water? Yeah, right. She folded her arms and gave him a measured look. ‘You must think I’m spectacularly stupid.’

‘What?’

‘You must really think I’m a twat. You must think all I do is…’ She trailed off. She’d just caught sight of Wellard. He was busy hosing down the wellingtons, not looking at her. If this was a joke he’d have been watching her carefully. Smirking. And when she looked back, Caffery’s face told her he wasn’t kidding either. Wasn’t his style. ‘Oh,’ she said lamely. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘No one asked you to wind me up?’

‘About what?’

‘Nothing.’ No. She’d been at fifty metres that day. Too deep for someone without equipment. Wellard said the surface of the quarry had been like glass. It had been a hallucination. Happened all the time with narcosis. You saw any crap the imagination could churn out. And if Caffery had suddenly turned into a true believer it was nothing to do with what she’d seen. Nothing to do with her. It was SEP: someone else’s problem. ‘Yeah, well, that’s your business. And my business is getting this body to the coroner without anything going missing.’

He nodded. ‘Do you think you can spare me that respirator first?’

‘You’re not going to be able to see anything.’

‘Humour me?’

She shrugged, went to the dive truck and got two clean respirators. They approached the van with its blacked-out window, ‘Private Ambulance’ in yellow letters on the side. She leant inside and unzipped the bag. A few flies crawled out. Fat and drugged. She hated the flies the most, hated their habit of laying eggs in the mouth, eyes, ears, genitals and nostrils, even the anuses of corpses. All fair game to a bluebottle. Lucy was no different. Maggots had eaten away most of the exposed flesh and taken her face back to the teeth in some places.

Caffery peered at her.

‘Not much to see.’ Flea’s voice was muffled in the mask. ‘Is there?’

He motioned for her to zip up the bag. They went over to the unit van, where the smell couldn’t reach them, and took off the respirators.

‘Well? What’s your professional opinion?’

‘My professional opinion?’ She laughed. ‘That you’re going to have a trip to the mortuary this afternoon.’

‘Then what about your personal opinion? I don’t think you’re short of those.’

‘Personally? I wasn’t looking when we did the recovery, but I don’t think there was anything unusual. Not on her head. You’d need to get all that yeuch rinsed out to be sure. It’s really not our business to be going through her hair out there in the field, y’know, so get thee to the mortuary, Mr Caffery.’ She took his respirator from him and chucked it into the truck. ‘It’ll be the Royal United in Bath, I should think. The on-call pathologist’s over there today.’

‘Sir?’

Flea might have said something else to Caffery that day. She might have said a little more and things might have panned out very differently if at that moment Stuart Pearce, the rolypoly search adviser who’d ordered the quarry search, hadn’t interrupted them.

‘Sir? Sir? I’d like a word.’

They both turned to watch him come across the car park, smiling at Caffery, his finger held up in the air as if he was making a point. He stopped a few feet away, breathing hard from the exertion. He had a soft face and a thick, sunburnt neck. His hair was combed across his balding pate. He addressed Caffery, acting as if Flea didn’t exist. ‘You’re the SIO, are you, sir?’

‘No – he’s gone. Wells station. You’ll catch him there in about ten.’ Caffery started to turn away, but Pearce wasn’t going to be put off.

‘Is it Lucy Mahoney in there?’ He gestured at the coroner’s van pulling out of the car park.

‘Who wants to know?’

He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a business card. ‘I was the search adviser on her disappearance. Today’s my rest day but I thought I’d better come in when I heard they’d found someone.’

That figured, she thought. He was the type: an officer freshly trained in a new job, full of enthusiasm, such a need to be involved that he’d turn up on rest days probably for no pay. All because he liked the glory. He was the sort who’d accidentally let his warrant card drop out of his wallet on to the bar when he was trying to pull someone. Thought women were more likely to open their legs for a cop.

‘You can see, can’t you, now that you’ve got the lie of the land, how I would never have put this place on my search parameters? I’d never have found her with what I had to go on – it was like a needle in a haystack.’

‘Don’t waste your breath, mate,’ said Caffery. ‘I’m just floating here. It’s not mine, it’s F District’s. I’m MCIU.’

‘MCIU?’

‘Major Crime.’

‘Yes. I know what MCIU is.’ He wiped his forehead. ‘You must be doing the Kitson case, then. I was the search adviser on that too, before the review got it bumped up to you from District.’

Bloody celebrity junkie, Flea thought. People like Pearce loved the media scrums that the Kitson case was attracting, the spotlight on the force. God, she didn’t like the guy. The more he talked, the more he ignored her, the more the fuses popped in her head.

‘I heard you got a fix on her phone from the Macrocell base station?’ he said. ‘Used that call analysis team, right?’

‘You’ve had your ear to the ground, then,’ said Caffery.

‘That mast was in the parameters I drew up, but it wasn’t a good area – not well covered by masts.’ Pearce put his hands on his hips and, head back, gazed out across the trees. Then he squinted in the other direction, at the horizon. ‘Somewhere like this would have been better. If Misty Kitson was out on that railway line we’d have got a fix on her in no time. But her phone was switched off, wasn’t it?’

‘Whose?’ Flea could hear irritation creeping into Caffery’s voice.

‘Lucy Mahoney’s. It was switched off, District told me. Bizarre, if you ask me – usually suicides use their phones. Make last-minute calls, even just to hear someone speak, or texts before they pull the plug. You can see why my job was difficult, can’t you? She broke all the rules.’